Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-11-29/News and notes

English Wikipedia new milestones

There are currently 7,239,940 articles on Wikipedia.

The English Wikipedia will reach six million articles around January 1 or perhaps a bit later, according to our estimate. Previous milestones are noted below.

• Astronaut Christina Koch, aka User:Astro Christina made the first direct edit from space on November 17, 2019, correcting an article about a space walk that she had made. Earlier edits have been composed in space, but had been relayed through an Earth-bound editor. For example, in a November 2017 edit the first content made for Wikipedia in space—a voice recording—was published. Editor Darenwelsh, who is an extravehicular activity flight controller at NASA, helped organize the new edit and first reported it on Reddit. Darenwelsh and his coworkers have set up 10 wikis at NASA.

Brief notes

• Amazon donates $1 million.
• .ORG registry sold to for-profit company: .ORG domain names will be registered by a new for-profit company, which is likely to cost the WMF some money. Sj reports that Ethos Capital—which has two staff—is buying the non-profit Public Interest Registry (PIR) at an estimated price of a billion dollars. The Electronic Frontier Foundation objects, as does the Wikimedia Foundation and 25 other non-profits, in an open letter to the Internet Society.
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval, on September 25, of three new Wikimedia movement affiliates, the Wikimedia Stewards User Group, Wikimedians of Santali Language User Group, and meta:Wikimedians of Saint Petersburg User Group.
• Tim Berners-Lee approves: Tim Berners-Lee's Contract for the Web received notice in The Guardian and The Verge. He also wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, saying the World Wide Web that he invented needs a re-do, although he lists Wikipedia as an example of what he's OK with.
• FRAMBAN denouement: WMF published a statement, "Community consultation on partial and temporary office actions".
• Translation pilot project: WMF is hiring up to six paid translators for each of these languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish.
• UNC Edit-a-thon: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Hussman School of Journalism and Media and the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center hosted a Newspapers in North Carolina Edit-a-thon on 24 October. The edit-a-thon sought to improve articles on newspapers in the U.S. state of North Carolina to give readers context for the sources they use, and to combat fake news.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, EvergreenFir and ToBeFree (11 November 2019), Girth Summit (26 October 2019), Kees08 (14 October 2019), GermanJoe (6 October 2019), Nosebagbear (3 October 2019), and Barkeep49 (11 September 2019).